The “marketplace ministry” movement that is sweeping the Body of Christ worldwide is, I believe, an important and valid end-time call. It has the potential to bring great wealth and influence to faith-filled believers who are prepared to “trust and obey” implicitly God’s biblical economic principles set out in His word.

Based on my own observations as I travel around the world, if there is a downside to this movement (and there is always a propensity for human beings to take anything to an extreme or distort and corrupt any great truth), it is that some marketplace groups have gone right outside the covering of the local church.

I am—and always have been—a local church man. I believe God ordained the local church (known as the “ekklesia” in Greek, which literally means “called out”) from the earliest time in the New Testament. A quick scan of the book of Acts shows that right from the beginning, believers met together in groups we would readily recognize today as “local churches” (Acts 2:46; 4:31; 5:12-14, 42; 8:1). And God ordained pastors (shepherds) to lead the local church, and to be the spiritual covering for the members of their flock.

I spend a lot of time telling business and professional people that they have a valid ministry that God has called them into their workplace as “culture missionaries,” but I always emphasize that their call into ministry should be under the covering of a pastor. For me personally, as a businessman with companies in three continents, I always feel a sense of security and protection because I choose to submit myself to the spiritual authority of my pastor.

As Christian workplace ministers, we are in a vicious spiritual battle—the enemy does not want us to become successful and influential, and to become conduits for the “end time wealth transfer” (Prov.13:22) as God pours wealth into His Kingdom through blood-washed, Bible-believing and faith-filled culture missionaries. When wealth and influence start to flow, we open ourselves up to a redoubled onslaught from the devil.

Knowing Our Position

The devil wants us to continue believing in the lie that a good Christian is a poor Christian. Once we start to buck that age-old canard, he wants to take us out of the game quick-smart! And he has plenty of deceptive and powerful weapons to bring to bear on us to further that end.

But we have our own weapons—the Sword of the Spirit (which is the Word of God), the whole armor of God, prayer (which includes, crucially, praying in tongues), faith-filled confessions and “binding and loosing” (Eph. 6:10-18). The weapons of our warfare “are not the weapons of this world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds” (2 Cor. 10:3-5, NIV).

The Apostle Paul, who himself was a “marketplace minister,” carrying out his business of tent-making while establishing churches, preaching, writing and traveling widely on missionary journeys, always stayed close to the divinely ordained institution of the “local church.” Even as the man who wrote a third of the New Testament, who met the Risen Christ on the road to Damascus, and who set the Christian message into divinely ordered doctrine, Paul still stayed close to and related continually to the local church.

Jesus Himself, our greatest Teacher, first mentions the word “church” in Matthew 16:18, when he tells Simon Peter that He will build His church on Peter’s inspired revelation: “You are the Christ the Son of the living God.”

The first time we meet Paul (or Saul as he was known then), we see him standing by approvingly while a mob viciously stones Stephen to death (Acts 7:57-60; 8:1). Then we see that he “made havoc” of the church going from house to house dragging believers off and throwing them into prison (Acts 8:3),.

It is almost as if the devil is trying to use Saul to destroy the church in its infancy, not realizing the plans God has for him after his conversion on the road to Damascus. The devil can sometimes seem very obvious in his tactics, and seemed to recognize in Saul a very powerful spiritual potential.

But after meeting Jesus, Saul is irrevocably turned around to become the mighty Apostle Paul, the archetypical marketplace minister, a towering figure in Christian annals—and a great supporter and advocate of the local church for the rest of his life!

The Example Of Paul

We see that as Paul starts his ministry under the tutelage of Barnabas the encourager, he spends a whole year in the local church in Antioch, where believers first come to be known as “Christians” (Acts 11:26). Then in Acts 13:1, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, the prophets and teachers in the local church pray and place their hands on Paul and Barnabas, sending them off on their first great missionary journey.

Notice a vital point—it is in the context of a local church congregation that Paul is set apart by the Holy Spirit, and then commissioned and sent out. And when the trip is completed, Paul and Barnabas sail back into Antioch and call the local church together (Acts 14:27).

In Acts 15:3, again Paul is appointed by the local church to an important project—to go up to Jerusalem to discuss issues such as circumcision with the “apostles and elders” there. “The church sent them on their way … and when they came to Jerusalem, they were welcomed by the church (Acts 15:3-4).

As Paul journeys around the then-known world, he sets up local groups of believers that come to be called “local churches,” ranging in size from just a handful to massive “megachurches” such as those in Corinth and Ephesus (Recent research has found that the “local church” in Ephesus could have been as large as 60,000). He continually nurtures and “shepherds” the local churches, setting up pastors and elders, encouraging and correcting them as and when they need it.

Time and time again, we see him arriving in a town or city, and immediately going to the local church: “When he landed at Caesarea, he went up and greeted the church and then went down to Antioch” (Acts 18:22, NIV). In Miletus, he sends for the “elders of the church” in Ephesus, and when they arrive, he implores them: “Keep watch over yourselves and all the flock of which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers. Be shepherds of the church of God, which He bought with His own blood” (Acts 20:17, 28).

Right up to the end, Paul was concerned about the church, and he makes it clear that we who come after are to follow his example:

• “Join with others in following my example” (Phil. 3:17)
• “(We did this) to make ourselves an example for you to follow” (2 Thess. 3:9)

God’s Purpose For The Local Church

Wayne Jackson, writing in the Christian Courier, says the local church is “something important” in the mind of God—it was a part of the divine plan from eternity (Eph. 3:10-11), and because Christ shed his blood to buy it (Acts 20:28).

He said: “The church of Christ was established 50 days after the death of Jesus. The record of this is found in the second chapter of the book of Acts. The time is specifically identified as the day of Pentecost. The power of the Holy Spirit was poured out supernaturally upon the apostles, and for the very first time in all of history, they began to proclaim the basic facts of the gospel message.

“Luke, the writer who recorded the events, said they who gladly received Peter’s words were baptized, and there were added together, that day, about 3,000 people.

From that time on, in the book of Acts, we read that the church is in existence. Prior to that time, all references to the church are in the future tense. Jesus, for example, had said in Matthew 16:18, “I will build my church.” That was about six months before He died. But from Acts 2 onward, the church is in existence.”

Paul Borthwick, in an article, The Local Church: Friend, Foe or Failure in the Great Commission, says there are four main reasons why the local church is central to missionary outreach and the Great Commission:

• The local church is primary in world missions because Jesus said it is;
• The local church is primary because the Body of Christ is there;
• The local church is primary because is affords us training and care; and
• The local church is primary because it is both the beginning and end of missions.

He goes on to say: “The local church is the missionary’s friend … a true partner in the ‘sending’ process. Jesus established it. We are part of the Body of Christ, expressed in local congregations.

“We need the training and discipline of life in the local church, because it is local churches we go to plant.”

So whether in fulfilling the Great Commission we are called to travel to the outer extremities of the globe, or to minister in our own local culture, we do so as part of the Body of Christ, the Church for which Jesus died and for which He paid in the precious currency of His blood.

The local church—the local congregation—is the practical and visible manifestation of the eternal and universal Church in our world, where the eternal meets the temporal, and where the “rubber meets the road.”

Fellow marketplace ministers, if we ignore it and move out from under its covering and protection, we do so at our own extreme peril.